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When I was younger, I sometimes wondered how my life would look like concerning dating guys. Most guys in puberty only care about the looks. Luckily I didn’t have to worry long, as I met Koen via internet when I was 12 (he was 13 at that time). Mind you, this was 6 years before Tinder even existed and online dating was something to be ashamed of. Koen and I met eachother on a website called Habbo Hotel and we added eachother on MSN. We used to chat every day and even started texting when we were at school – there was no WhatsApp available yet! After chatting for more than two years, we decided to meet in real life. As I was only 14, my parents didn’t allow me to go visit him, so we invited Koen to come over here.

I have to tell you something..

All this time I didn’t tell Koen about my illness. I was afraid it would scare him and thought he maybe didn’t like me anymore. At first I didn’t even want to meet him, because I wasn’t sure whether he would accept me. Of course I had to tell him about my tumor before he would see me. The evening before our meeting, I asked him to read my website and luckily he reacted very positive.

Koen:

“I was a little shocked when I heard Wilma’s story for the first time. Wilma and I often turned on the webcam, but she always positioned the webcam on the right side of her face. Sometimes I asked something about the position of her webcam, but she came up with excuses, like ‘the webcam is always falling and I finally got it right’. The evening before we met, she positioned the webcam on her face. Of course it looked different than I was used to, but I didn’t mind. I was looking forward to meeting her the next day. Nowadays I don’t even notice Wilma’s tumor, only when I really pay attention to it.”

Future

We’ve been together since the day we met (November 30th 2008). As we used to live 40 minutes away from each other – and we didn’t have driver’s licenses till we were 18 – we only saw eachother in weekends. Now we happily live together and we’ve made some exciting travel plans for coming years!